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2021/12/17

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Sociology: It was new users who helped the political polarization of the Internet social media "Reddit"

Nature Japan

Social sciences: New users drive political polarization on the online social platform Reddit

 
From an analysis of 2005 billion comments posted to Reddit during the 2018 years 14-51, users (mainly right-wing users) who newly registered with Reddit during the 2016 US presidential election were the same. It was revealed that it caused a significant political polarization at the site.A paper reporting this finding will be published in Nature.This finding casts doubt on the traditional notion that it was existing Reddit users who promoted political polarization during this period.

Reddit is one of the world's largest social platforms on the Internet, consisting of thousands of discussion-based communities (subreddits).It has been suggested that being part of a group of like-minded people in the Internet community can lead to polarization, especially with political views.However, it is not clear whether individual users will move towards extreme idealism over time, or whether a group of centrists will be replaced by users with more extreme opinions.

Now, Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson have developed a method for assessing social stances (including political trends) using machine learning to investigate how polarization occurred in Reddit, 2005-2018. We evaluated the social stance of all Reddit posts in the approximately 1 subreddit community of the year.In principle, the opinions of individual users were not polarized over time, but at Reddit, political polarization took place around the time of the 2016 US presidential election.Those who promoted this mass-level political polarization were disproportionately new users on the right side of the political spectrum and new political interests.These new users moved the right-wing debate further to the right, but did not affect the left-wing and centrist debates.

According to the authors, this method of quantifying social stance in a community on the Internet can influence the understanding of the social context of behavior on the Internet and the design of online platforms. It is said that.Our findings suggest that observations, such as the development of polarization, may be due to changes in the dynamics of a particular group rather than changes in political ideas at the social level.

doi: 10.1038 / s41586-021-04167-x
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Reprinted from: "Sociology: It was new users who helped the political polarization of the Internet social media "Reddit"'
 

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